From a socialist political background, Clara Zetkin fervently believed that socialism was the only movement that could truly meet the needs of working-class women and that feminism was a particular tool of the upper and middle classes.

However, although her political views focused on class divisions, rather than gender, her work served to highlight the feelings and the real situation of women at that time and, it must be said, that it still happens in unfortunately many parts of the world.

In 1907, working women in New York City organized demonstrations demanding better wages, shorter hours, and the right to join a union. In 1909, garment workers in New York went on strike for 13 weeks in what was called "The 20K Raise."

These struggles inspired Zetkin to propose the day: to honor the struggles of working-class women and draw connections between the fight for workers' power and the fight against women's oppression. Socialists then began organizing International Women's Day marches the following year, drawing tens of thousands across Europe.

According to world socialists, at the core of Zetkin's contributions are absolutely vital and enduring ideas: the forms women's oppression took, its roots in capitalism and the family, and the need for a united revolutionary class struggle. worker to end that oppression.

“What made women's labour particularly attractive to the capitalists was not only its lower price but also the greater submissiveness of women.”

Today, the goal of Clara Zetkin's struggle remains: we commemorate this International Women's Day by calling for equal pay and working conditions for all women. Although great strides have been made in recent years, especially in social networks, the salary gap persists.

Let us celebrate, remember and honor all working women who are fighting, because it is only their own struggle that has brought them to where they are right now, although there is still much to be achieved.

Zetkin was very interested in women's politics, including the fight for equal opportunity and women's suffrage. Upon her return to Germany nearly a decade later, she became editor of the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) women's newspaper, Die Gleichheit (Equality), a position she held for twenty-five years.

In August 1910, an International Women's Conference was organized to precede the general meeting of the Second Socialist International in Copenhagen, Denmark. Inspired by the actions of Luise Zietz, an American socialist, she supported the establishment of an International Women's Day, although no date was specified at that conference.

The outbreak of war in 1914 radically disillusioned Zetkin. She became sick and depressed and hostile towards what she considered a "bankrupt proletariat".

Estranged from the SPD, she convened an international women's conference in Bern in 1915, upholding the ideal of internationalism amid the bloodshed facilitated by the nationalist "opportunism" of the Second International. She was arrested in 1915 for her anti-war stance and charged with "treason," but due to her poor health, she was released after four months.

In 1916, Zetkin was one of the co-founders of the Spartacist League (Marxist revolutionary movement) and the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had split in 1917 from its mother party, the SPD, in protest at its pro-Government stance. from the war.

In January 1919, after the German Revolution in November of the previous year, the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) was founded; Clara Zetkin also joined this and represented the party from 1920 to 1933 in the Reichstag.

In 1925 she was elected president of the German left-wing solidarity organization Rote Hilfe. In August 1932, as President of the Reichstag by seniority, she was entitled to give the opening speech, and she used it to call on the workers to unite in the fight against fascism.

When Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party took power, the Communist Party of Germany was banned, after the Reichstag fire in 1933. Ella Zetkin went into exile for the last time, and this time she would go to the Soviet Union.

She died there, in Arkhangelskoye, near Moscow, in 1933, at the age of 76. Her ashes were placed in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, next to the Moscow Kremlin Wall, near Red Square. Her funeral was attended by leading communists from all over Europe, including Joseph Stalin and Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya.